Asia’s internet registry APNIC finds about 50 million unused IPv4 addresses behind the sofa
(2020/07/09)
- Reference: 1594267269
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/09/asias_internet_registry_apnic_finds/
- Source link:
APNIC, the regional Internet address registry for India, China, and 54 other Asia-Pacific nations, has found about fifty million IPv4 addresses behind the sofa.
The organisation recently [1]shared an analysis of a 2018 survey of stakeholders and members that found reclamation of unused IPv4 space was considered a high priority because not every local organisation is ready to go all-in on IPv6. That result spurred APNIC to look for unadvertised IPv4 addresses and it found plenty.
Around 50 million were allocated under previous policies but have, for unspecified reasons, not been pressed into service. A further 350,000 were issued for reasons that are no longer considered valid. And a further 2.3 million were allocated before APNIC was given jurisdiction of address assignment, but have been unused for sufficiently long that the registry is allowed to hand them out again.
To distribute the addresses APNIC will add a new IPv4 Transfer Listing Service to its MyAPNIC member portal and chase members to ask if they’ll relinquish resources that have gone unused for several years. It expects that the addresses it has identified will be either put back into a pool or transferred among members.
IPv4 has under 4.2 billion available addresses so a find of 50 million unused addresses represents just a tick over one percent of the total available pool. If carrier-grade network address translation is applied to them all, it could permit hundreds of millions of devices to hook up to IPv4. Which isn’t ideal given that IPv6 has many advantages. But it is handy because some APNIC members still see demand for IPv4.
APNIC says it hopes to have its tools to access the un-used address ready “by the end of the year”. ®
Get our [2]Tech Resources
[1] https://blog.apnic.net/2020/07/06/reclaiming-unused-ipv4-address-space/
[2] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
The organisation recently [1]shared an analysis of a 2018 survey of stakeholders and members that found reclamation of unused IPv4 space was considered a high priority because not every local organisation is ready to go all-in on IPv6. That result spurred APNIC to look for unadvertised IPv4 addresses and it found plenty.
Around 50 million were allocated under previous policies but have, for unspecified reasons, not been pressed into service. A further 350,000 were issued for reasons that are no longer considered valid. And a further 2.3 million were allocated before APNIC was given jurisdiction of address assignment, but have been unused for sufficiently long that the registry is allowed to hand them out again.
To distribute the addresses APNIC will add a new IPv4 Transfer Listing Service to its MyAPNIC member portal and chase members to ask if they’ll relinquish resources that have gone unused for several years. It expects that the addresses it has identified will be either put back into a pool or transferred among members.
IPv4 has under 4.2 billion available addresses so a find of 50 million unused addresses represents just a tick over one percent of the total available pool. If carrier-grade network address translation is applied to them all, it could permit hundreds of millions of devices to hook up to IPv4. Which isn’t ideal given that IPv6 has many advantages. But it is handy because some APNIC members still see demand for IPv4.
APNIC says it hopes to have its tools to access the un-used address ready “by the end of the year”. ®
Get our [2]Tech Resources
[1] https://blog.apnic.net/2020/07/06/reclaiming-unused-ipv4-address-space/
[2] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/